FIELD REPORT: In the Beauty Parlors and Bunkers of Berlin

July 23, 2011

ONE YEAR LATER: 07.23.11 – Exactly a year later, and a young man of identical background and beliefs to this man of a year ago, this Berlin hairdresser, murders nearly one hundred people in Norway in the name of far-right hate. Exactly to the day.

A year ago, there were only a few people who had any patience with my experience at the hair salon – mostly, I was met with barely-hidden disbelief, skepticism, and then hostility. Not by Germans, but by Americans who were unwilling to believe that hate in Europe isn’t restricted to a few fringe thugs from the lower classes.

Last year, I arrived in Berlin after a grueling fellowship summer (and previous year) working at hate-crime sites throughout Europe…Portugal, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Russia. Rather exhausted and depressed, my friends encouraged me to treat myself to a “spa day” in Mitte. Yes, I thought, I need a distraction. I found a “nice” salon. The soft-spoken, bohemian-chic young man assigned to me was charismatic and very handsome. Highly intelligent and well-spoken, he said he had recently dropped out of his graduate studies in History at the university – in part, as I quickly discovered, because he was an automatic weapons afficionado and avid far-right activist.

He spoke to me very plainly for the three hours we spent together, even after he finished with my hair. Again and again, he was amused by the irony of a contemporary Nazi cutting off the hair of a contemporary Jew. We have been here before! he joked. I asked him what he wanted to be doing a year from now. He said he wanted to go to Lithuania and join the far right movement there, because the time for action had arrived.

I think of him now, and Anders Behring Breivik, and all the young men and their guns. And all the people who hate – not the ones who hate other people, but the ones who hate having to think about unpleasant topics, like the sad and angry woman with the uncomfortable haircut in Berlin.

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23 July, 2010, BERLIN

I’ve long said that to truly know a town, you must first go to the beauty parlor and then the cemetery. These two locations have the down-low on where all the bodies are buried, so to speak. And today in Berlin was no different.

My first morning here in Berlin, I decided to stroll the streets until I found a promising looking shop. I ducked inside, and the hairdresser – like me, blue-eyed, black-haired, and in his 30s – asked what I wanted.

I pointed at my scalp. Look – see? One summer in Bavaria and suddenly I have grey hairs, I said, and he doubled over with laughter, then sat down with a hair pick to get down to business.

Curious about the kinky texture of my hair, he immediately asked about my family ancestry.

Lithuanian, I said.

Oh, he said, and drew my hair between his gloved fingers, examining it. Jewish. He paused a moment before continuing – I hope your family got out before my grandfather got there – grinning happily, quizzically, and a bit hopefully at my reflection in the mirror.

My grandfather, he said, was the Commander of an SS Panzer Division assigned to invade, liquidate and occupy the villages surrounding Memel.

Do you know Memel? he asked.

Memel, I told him, is exactly where my family lived.

He nodded. He was pleased to hear that my immediate family had left earlier in the century, then asked, Was anybody who stayed still alive after the war?

No, nobody is left.

He said the sudden re-collision of our ancestries was a bit odd. A second meeting of DNA.

I said yes, it was certainly odd.

I asked him how his grandfather felt about his SS work in Memel. He said the problem in contemporary Germany is that people are required by law to be dishonest: to be honest would be to say that my grandfather is still proud of what he accomplished there. But that Jewish and German organizations watch carefully what people say, and so one has to lie all the time.

Usually, he said, my grandfather must lie and say he has regrets.

His grandson decided not to lie in my presence, it seems 77 [a raven just flew through my open window and stood on the 7 keys on my laptop, then vanished out the window again], because he and I were beyond such niceties. We have a peculiar history in common. A sort of reverse-destiny: an ancestral path that interlaces.

But frankly, we were in control of all of Europe. The blitzkrieg was brilliant – genius. We invented it. Nobody ever accomplished that kind of success before we did. It is unfortunate that people had to die, of course, but it was an impressive achievement and we are not allowed to celebrate that innovation. And we have been told to be ashamed of it. Now, the World Cup has become a very important turning point. Again, we are able to be proud to be Germans, and not hide it.

I asked him whether he thinks that his kind of truth-telling is controlled because there is still anti-Semitism in Germany. No, he said, although we all know that the Jews have caused the banks to destroy the world’s prosperity, that is not the fault of all the Jews.

Besides, I pointed out, there really aren’t so very many Jews in Germany anymore, so isn’t anti-Semitism rather out-dated and irrelevant?

Yes, he said, pensive, I hadn’t thought of that before, but that’s very true.

Talking to him reminded me of the fact that being nice does not mean being kind, and being polite does not mean you’re not a sociopath, and being friendly does not mean being good. All it means is that somewhere along the way you acquired manners. Because we had good manners, we were nice, polite and friendly to one another, and yet an undercurrent of electricity suggested that we were each wary of the other’s ideologies and intentions, a bit revolted by what was unspoken within the candor, and yet perversely reassured by our common interests.

The past is what we had in common – after all, his ancestor had liquidated my ancestors’ village. And he was doing a ridiculously good job with my hair.

And in some way, we were deeply relieved to be undertaking this intimate duel of a conversation.

As if old grievances needed desperately to be aired.

It was as if we needed each other, and knew it.

As he painstakingly hunted through my hair, he told me about his hatred of America and Americans, but his appreciation for its progressive gun laws, and his frustration with restrictions on Germans owning guns. I told him I trained in Texas to shoot with my Army friends’ AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifles. He was very impressed and envious – his hobby is to go to battlefields in Latvia and Lithuania with his metal detector and salvage old machine guns from the Nazis and sell them to far right fetishists.

He wants to move East, to Lithuania, as soon as possible: to live in the woods and live more freely and trace the steps and artifacts of his grandfather. He named the towns he loves, and they are some of my favorites, too.

We both talked about our passion for the Lithuanian forests and the Baltic shore – its beauty and mystery and silence and sadness, the peculiar underwater quality of its blue-green light, and its abundant bird life. We talked about our differing love for the birds of the Curonian Spit (I don’t want to shoot people, he interjected, but I do want to shoot birds. The ones with the orange legs and the long black beaks. They are incredible).

Last summer in the lightly forested woods of Lithuania’s Curonian Spit, I stood in the pits dug out for the SS Panzer Division’s tanks. They still pock the forest floor – precisely cut-out shapes of particularly modified rectangles, with little troughs hollowed out for the tank barrel. Standing in them, the earth rises up to meet your shoulders. Sometimes they are filled with wildflowers. The soil is so recently turned over that it’s softer there, and more delicate things grow.

The Panzer holes are stationed at even, eerie intervals along the road, as if still waiting to mow down anyone who comes their way. The phantom Panzers.

Last May, my hairdresser and I were both there in the same woods. Perhaps hours or days apart, each of us stood in the same tank holes – holes his grandfather had dug. Both of us poked about in the same leaves looking for…something.

Perhaps that something is the end of the string that tethers people like him and me – people who do not perceive time in normal, well-adjusted ways, who dwell unhealthily in the morbid and apparently irrelevant, who cannot leave the past in the past.

Perhaps we poke about in the Lithuanian woods trying to untie that string, to release ourselves from a sense of deep unrest.

One wall of my room here at the little Kunsthaus in Berlin was once part of the actual Berlin Wall – the house itself located in the former East Berlin. Photographs from the 1970s show my wall seamlessly integrated with The Wall itself, and “my” half of the building boarded up and strapped with razor wire – especially what is now my window.  Because from my window, people used to try and jump over the wall onto the train tracks, where they met with death.

From that window in 2010, I can just barely see one upper corner of the Reichstag, and a large swatch of cracked-out concrete and rubble and half-grass that has not yet been built upon. Obliterated first by the Russians in the Battle of Berlin, and then later – no man’s land. The death strip. Today, a swath of earth still confused about its purpose and its past. Exhausted and in need of…love? rehabilitation? Like me, it’s a misplaced and lonely-looking eyesore in the otherwise gloriously creative Eden that we tell ourselves is Berlin.

My hairdresser said he is proud of every bullet hole in every wall. He said he thinks many very nice, non-hateful, perfectly-lovely Germans feel that way about the Battle of Berlin. He said it was a glorious time – how few Nazis held off how many million Russians, and how genius were their strategies of urban defense.  How they fought even with trowels and sticks at the end.

He said he thinks that the older people and the Bavarians are secretly very proud of most of what was achieved throughout the war, of the solidarity, and that many were simply used by evil people and it’s painful to remember that aspect of their lives.

And the younger ones, he said, are very exhausted and more than a bit resentful. It wasn’t our fault. Most of us are very nice people. But we are the ones who now face the consequences. And we are tired of it.

Everything on the East side of Berlin that is older than 1946 is still covered in bullet holes – patched and repaired sometimes, but not always. The patches and repairs are all clearly undertaken at various decades, and with various degrees of butchery or grace.

In part, I find it easier to be in Berlin because there is a palpable sense of consequence here. This is where a great reckoning took place, in all directions, with abandon and intent. This is not like the Bavarian countryside, where I had a sense of Jews gone missing from a world that remained otherwise intact. This is centuries and generations of an entire urban civilization mutilated and destroyed beyond repair. Where action and reaction and motion and consequence – as though the laws of physics govern human behavior as well – are illustrated beyond argument. The tragedy is complete. It is gone. Completely gone. Done. Over. Finished.

Being in Berlin, one hopes that all the cruelty that humanity can inflict on itself was exhausted here in this place.

But not storytelling. From the ashes, the phoenix must rise. And thus, even for a man resentful of remembering and exhausted by the unjust facing of consequences, my hairdresser is thrilled by the opportunity to tell a story, and create a brand new memory of the past for me:

Right underneath us, he said, disentangling the pick from my matted tangle of hair and pointing it straight down, Hitler killed himself.

I suppose I looked a little startled. He looked a little gratified. He slowed down, stopped moving, looked at me in the mirror and explained it patiently, as if to an exceedingly stupid capitalist American pig.

This salon. Is over. Hitler’s bunker. The communists. Built. This building. On. The Ruins. There is nothing left. Of the bunker. Just this building. And beauty. Parlor. Isn’t it an ugly building? It’s very ugly. And yet. Below us. Hitler died. And now here. I do the hair. Of a Jew.

I don’t know if the coordinates are true – I have to find a map, and sort it out for myself.

The tint my hairdresser put in my hair will gradually work its way, over the years, down to the ends of my hair, and perhaps eventually it will be cut off. But it will be in there, this morning in Berlin when I sat in a barber’s chair over Hitler’s death place getting my hair groomed by the grandson of the man who liquidated my ancestors’ village.

I thought of something I read yesterday – an essay on The Root by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka about Africa’s role in the slave trade. Soyinka writes, Some progress has been made with “coming to terms” with historic truth. The season of strident denial appears to be fading, but a frame of mind still exists that resents truth’s imperatives.

Soyinka continues, Yes, indeed, we can pursue truth for its own sake, bloodless, detached, ahistoric, divorced from current actualities, or we can seek truth as a key to understanding the present, and identifying the pointers it holds for the future. Thus, it sometimes appears that the main bone of contention is: To what end is truth evoked?

I understand that “Germans” are ready to move on to a place beyond blame, shame, or endless accountability. I suspect “Jews” are ready to move on to a place beyond victimhood, vulnerability, and humiliation.

And yet nobody can. Not all of us, not at the same time, not in the same way, not without confusion and resentment of having to deal with it at all.

That, I believe, we hold in common.

I’m sympathetic to the resentfulness of truth’s imperatives: there’s a tiresome perversity to wrangling over a past that cannot be changed, but which is still being written, and a future that unfolds from stories, that are still being told – hence all this still matters.

And truisms will continue to fail us, because this situation is far too complex, and – as my hairdresser accurately complained – too much is still unsaid.

No wonder Hitler burned the books: they’re a noisy, troublesome, quarrelsome lot.

In wrangling over a past, we are perhaps not so much trying to resurrect the past, but to control the future. Our personal futures.

There’s still something nagging at too many of us. Something that lingers behind, just out of view. Something like a phantom Panzer.

In the recent past, my hairdresser’s grandfather and the Jews of Europe were entangled in events that – without our conscious consent – deeply inform subsequent generation’s identities.  Perhaps like children, we resent it, and seek the independence to define it for ourselves. And since it’s indefinable, we keep picking at it, hoping to move past the limitations of the legacies we inherited.  To not attempt to evolve is to defy the fundamentals of our biology.

Within our biology, there’s still grief and fear – this embedded in the tissue, and likely in the DNA. The pain and grief and fear will continue to spiral its way through our bodies until they are fully exorcised – everybody wants to be exorcized, but none of us know how it’s done.

Yes, I said, I think we can all agree that we’re exhausted.

I think of my hairdresser’s doubtlessly nuanced and complex intimate reasons for plying his metal detector all over his grandfather’s battlefields. Then of course, of my own convoluted personal anthropologies and ideological pathologies and unwieldy psycho-spiritual obsessions.

I liked him, my hairdresser.  Through the interface of the mirror, we made eye contact nearly continually for nearly two hours: how often does that happen? And many of the words that came out of his mouth were unpleasant to hear, while his actions towards me, his client, were solicitous and even tender. As he yanked my hair to the point of tears, he said nice things to me: you don’t often see hair like this in Germany. Our common ground was horrifying and yet to have a distressing preoccupation in common with another human being was a tangible relief.

We were both, I think, a little fascinated by the intimacy.

Berlin has always amplified perversity. Our relationship fit into this tradition.

I asked him whether his own quest to understand his family legacy is any different than that of Jews who come back to Germany trying to understand what happened, making life difficult for the young Germans who are ready to move on.

I mean, you’re not moving on, either, I said, even if we Jews weren’t here to pester you. You’re spending your summers standing in your grandfather’s trenches, filling your pockets with his empty bullets.

He didn’t have an answer. He looked sad.

We both felt intimidated by our own internal mysteries.

He asked me what Jews hope to achieve by coming to Germany and poking around in something so painful and making everybody’s lives miserable. I said perhaps the grief cannot be processed as long as we’re still, on some level, terrified by our inability to understand how a community of our neighbors, typical human beings, could transform commonplace bigotry into industrialized genocide.

Despite this theory, I’m not sure I had an answer, either. We were both sad.

When his work on my long obstreperous curls was all done, my hairdresser and I stared at each other for a bit too long, long after the moment that should have resolved with politely shaking hands or even exchanging a nod and wave. Eventually, I rested my fingers on his shoulder, and left them there. He shivered a bit, surprised. We knew when last our DNA was quite so close.

Now I’m back in my room at the Kunsthaus, with my back to the S-bahn tracks and to the window from which the first East Germans jumped to their death.

Soyinka writes, Let it be acknowledged that labor in the fields of truth is forever unfinished.

An accidental encounter with a mere glimmering of long-obscured truths can only provoke an ever-widening curiosity, hopefully deepening enquiry, and any community of peoples with the slightest shred of historic sensibility must learn to live with this paradox.

The next question is what, if anything, is to be done with truth–or uncovered fragments of its tantalizing repletion.  What constitutes a disservice to our faculty of judgment, however, is to place obstacles in the way of assembling truth’s fragments.

In Berlin, a window isn’t a window. A beauty parlor isn’t a beauty parlor. There is always more, always something still unsaid longing to be said. In the best of times, it’s expressed. The obstacles between people are removed. Behind me, the Berlin Wall is dismantled, but the land around it is bleak and pocked with craters, and shrapnel, and bullet holes and bits of barbed wire and shattered bone.

You can’t live in this Kunsthaus expecting quiet, or calm. The view is the view. The window is the window. Bodies have leapt from it. Tonight I will sleep beneath it. Ravens fly through it, and leave 77’s imbedded in my writing. What does that mean? In Gematria, it is mazel – the word for destiny.

Beyond the window, fragments of old obstacles. The wall is gone, and the broken rubble left behind doesn’t make for a pretty view. But it’s my view. And that’s just the way it’s going to have to be for a while.